Why did you become a feminist?
At home I saw my brothers sitting with my father and my mother cooking, washing… And waiting for me to help her…
Unfair.
…And that my body at 13 years old already had a meaning for some that did not always respect my dignity. So I became aware that I was a woman and that being one wouldn’t have to mean that I washed anyone’s dishes and shirts.
How did you transform anger into criticism?
In a secondhand book store I found The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir… I still remember how it smelled.
“A free woman,” said Beauvoir, “is the opposite of an easy woman.”
It made me a feminist and, already in Oxford, I read Judith Butler… and I discovered that we could have any gender we wanted, because gender is a mere construction.
Is gender a social construction and not a mandate or a natural destiny?
Knowing that we could have any sexual identity we wanted, because everyone is a social construction, was fascinating; because this way I could turn my sexual identity into my own creation instead of being the mere self-interested construction of a sexist or patriarchal society.
How did your environment react?
The truth is that during my adolescence I was a tomboy, something of a tomboy.
What did your family say?
My grandmother advised me one day gently and firmly: “Mary, you should grow your hair long and get married.”
He listened?
I was a radical activist then.
I have read that she lived in a lesbian squat commune.
I grew up with the “end of history”, in the fall of the USSR, and my experience in that feminism ended in 2008 with the subprime crisis…
Why did that crisis affect you so much?
I had invested all my savings in an online education startup: we wanted to eliminate intermediaries and put all the training at the service of people.
And wasn’t it the best time?
I lost everything. And I listened to my grandmother for the next seven years.
I see you have long hair… and did you get married?
Over the next seven years I changed my life and got married, yes, and left London. Actually, my grandmother had said to me, “Why don’t you try to be normal?”
Isn’t it so bad to be normal?
The truth is, no.
If things are the way they are – said Popper – is it because they are not that bad?
In fact, I began a long process of reflection about what is worth it and what is not in being normal; but he no longer rejected everything out of hand. And the decisive thing is that I was a mother: I had a daughter.
!! Congratulations!!
And being a mother, some reasons became clear to me as to why things are the way they are. On the other hand, radical feminism does not assume motherhood without a certain condescension towards mothers, because it reduces it to staying at home putting on diapers. There is no pro-maternal feminism.
Because?
They believe that when you have a baby your brain stops working…
Does radical feminism despise motherhood?
Yes, but you don’t become a stupid cow by giving milk. I started to think about my book and I no longer believed in the idea of ??progress.
Don’t you think we’ve made some progress?
The very idea of ??progress is a derivative of Christian eschatology with that illusory final judgment towards which we all advance. Things change and improve, of course, but not in that way. And I thought about writing Feminism against progress. Because feminism is linked to that fallacy of progress.
Don’t you think that women have more power than a century ago and it’s better that way?
The sexual revolution that began in the sixties was not a moral advance because women have lost it, since it was just another stage of industrialization in which technology went from industrializing the world to industrializing our bodies.
Isn’t it an advance that women can decide how many children they have?
Of course birth control is an advance, like so many achieved by feminism; but not the pill, because it seems to repair something that is actually natural. Today there are better methods.
And turn the decision of what gender you want into hormones and surgery?
It is transforming our bodies into a kind of Lego that can be disassembled and assembled at will. It leads us to transhumanism.
Surrogate mothers?
Another nightmare. It is industrializing the birth rate at the expense of poor women.
